Why I Am Grateful to Live in America (Part One)

Today I am grateful to be living in the United States of America. In my opinion, it is the best nation on the earth, and for reasons that are holistically bigger than any single reason alone. It’s not just our people, or our form of government, or our services, or our history (warts and all) or our size, or our importance in the world, or our wealth, or our natural resources, or our military prowess, or our sweeping geology, or our entertainment industry, or our technological innovators. It’s not just any of those. It is all of those, and all of those combined is an impossible score no other nation can match.

Our people come from every nation on earth. Most came by methods and means that were legal at the time of their arrival, many did not. Most are law-abiding people who just want a better life for themselves and their families than they had yesterday, every day into the future. Some of the smartest, wealthiest, cleverest, prettiest, wittiest, deepest individuals on the planet live in America. We also have an enormous share of idiots, beggars, dullards, hags, and dim-witted luddites. This grand melange of teeming population is what we used to call “The Melting Pot” — all races, cultures, and societies coming together to make something better. Today they call it diversity. There’s always some conflict when so many mixes go into the pot. But you won’t see another place in the world where more races live together in relative harmony, and I’m grateful for that.

We have an amazing — and unique — governmental form that is uniquely adapted to support the needs of so many diverse groups of people. The United States isn’t a democracy: it’s a republic. Our electoral college system ensures that no single group of people who align in one specific region can overcome the will of the united people across our great nation. If you look on a state-by-state basis, for instance, Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton, even though the enormous number of people crammed into California single-handedly swayed the general-population-vote-count in her favor. She won the most number of votes… he won the biggest number of proportional votes across the nation, and outright won significantly more individual states than she did. I’m grateful that our system was designed for such a moment, and worked when it needed to.

Mountains that look like people? I love this country!

Honestly, I could have broken down every one of those points into their own days of gratitude, and maybe I still will, but for now, suffice to say I’m glad I live in America.

This is post number 13 out of the 1000 I pledged to write in my 48th year. It’s also day 9 of my Year of Gratitude. If you want to see all my other goals for this year, check out the Chaostician page.